FBI's global fraud inquiry leads to village youths with a home computer

FBI special agents have swooped on a farming village in west Wales and arrested two 18-year-old alleged computer hackers said to be involved in a $3m global internet fraud.

Detectives from the FBI's Philadelphia office have been investigating the case since last year after banks and businesses in the US, Canada, Thailand and Britain were hacked into and credit card details stolen.

The FBI traced the alleged online fraud to Clynderwen in Pembrokeshire, and a team of agents was dispatched to the UK. Working with officers from Dyfed Powys police they staked out the village, a rural community with a population of less than 600.

When the crack squad swooped at dusk on Thursday they were confronted not with a team of hardened internet criminals but two youths sitting behind a £700 home computer. The unnamed suspects, who allegedly used the alias "Curador" on the internet, were taken to the police station in Carmathen for questioning, accompanied by their parents and family solicitors. Their computer was seized, and was being examined.

The pair, who were arrested under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, were released on police bail while inquiries continue.

A spokesman for Dyfed Powys police, Dai Davies, said the case related to unlawful intrusions into business computers and the theft of credit card information. "The investigation was supported by a number of international agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted police and investigators from the international banking and credit card industry."

A spokesman for the FBI in Washington said the pair had accessed the credit card databases of nine e-commerce companies, and had published the details of 26,000 credit card accounts on the internet. The spokesman said the final cost of the hacking could be over $3m.

A British detective working on the case said: "It is a major fraud across the major continents of the world. The boys' motivation may not have been money - more the challenge of pulling something like this off. We have taken a pile of stuff from their homes and it is being photographed at police headquarters. It appears to be a case of two very clever lads who have found themselves playing in the big league."